This is part 2 of a 3 part series. To read part 1, click here.

So far as the post-op procedures went, I had three different sets of eye drops to use. The first was an antibiotic that I was to use four times per day. I started it the day before the surgery. The next was an anti-inflammatory/steroid to be used every 2 hours for the first four days, and then 4x/day after that. Finally, I was to use preservative free, single use saline drops every hour for the first week and as-needed after that.

I set up something of a schedule so that there was virtually no overlap between them. The problem with overlap is that one set of drops can push out the benefits of another set of drops, so you are supposed to wait a minimum of 5 minutes between each set of drops.

The first set of drops I used at 8am, noon, 4pm and 8pm. The next set I used every odd hour of the day on the hour. And the saline drops I used at the half hour mark of every hour. I was also to do a full round of each set just before going to bed, which prolonged my bedtime rituals by about 20 minutes each night.

Here’s an unpleasant little tidbit about the drops. Your tear ducts are somehow connected to your throat, for drainage purposes. So these drops end up in your throat. As a byproduct, sometimes they hit your taste buds. These drops are the nastiest things in the world. A “good” friend of mine once convinced me to try this stuff called Echinacea drops. The story was that it’s supposed to have some weird medical benefits and that I needed to try it. This is the same guy who got me to try Goldschlagger years earlier.

Anyway, the drops reminded me of Echinacea drops. The taste of the drops isn’t nearly as strong as the Echinacea, but if you’re ever interested in finding out what it tastes like, I invite you to give it a whirl. You won’t thank me, I’m sure of it.

In addition to the drops, I was to wear my Spiderman eyes every night for the first two weeks. I thought they would be really uncomfortable, but it wasn’t really that bad. They sit right against your face, so you don’t really notice after a few minutes, so long as your eyes are closed. Looking through them really distorts your vision because they aren’t glasses and your eyes aren’t healed yet. The down side of those was that in the morning, I had to peel them off because they were held on with tape. Avoid taping them to your eyebrows. Trust me on that one. And there were some slight indentations in your face for a few hours every morning from where the plastic was held against your face.

So the doctor gives my wife instructions to have me lie down in the car on the way home, close my eyes and try to get to sleep. She was ordered to get me a Snickers bar or some other similar candy bar with some substance to it for the ride home. When I get home, I was to put some drops in and then go straight to bed for at least 3 hours.

We got home around 5pm and I went to bed, as instructed. A short time later, my wife brought me some pizza for dinner, which I ate in bed with my eyes closed. If you ever want to know what it’s like to be blind, try eating dinner with your eyes closed. It’s another freaky experience.

I actually fell asleep for a little bit and got up around 8:30pm. A few more rounds of eye drops and after chatting with my wife for about an hour and a half, it was back to bed. Surprisingly, it wasn’t difficult to get back to sleep. I set my alarm clock for 5:45am so I could be out the door at 6am to be at the doctors’ office by 7am.

I know what you’re thinking. Gross. He didn’t even shower. Those were the doctors’ orders, I swear. He said not to shower or take the Spiderman eye shields off until after I came back and he looked at my eyes.

Amazingly enough, when I woke up the next morning, I could see. My vision wasn’t perfect, but I could see almost as well as when I had glasses. I got to my post-op appointment just before 7am and then waited around until after 8am to be seen. Notice a pattern here? There were easily more than 20 people in the waiting room for their post-op and I was one of the last people there. He had done the surgery for every one of them the day before.

Several of us got to chatting about our experience, the exact procedure we had done, the fact that the light would move on us, etc. Two people there had eye surgery in the past. One had his back in 2003 and had the RK surgery. He had a lot of scarring and had to wait until it healed before they could do it again.

The second guy had his surgery about a year ago. His vision had started deteriorating and although he was still happy with it, the doctors said they could do better. Since it was free with the insurance, he said to go for it.

A few others chatted about the PRK surgery they had and discussed in detail to the point that I was really glad I didn’t get it. The reason they had a different procedure because they didn’t have thick enough eye tissue to cut flaps that they could peel back and use the laser. Instead “they took this thing that looked like a toothbrush and scratched the front of the eyeball off”. Their words, not mine. Their stories made me glad that I declined that as an option if the surgeon decided he couldn’t do the LASIK.

The surgeon looked at my eyes for a couple of minutes and said they seemed to be healing pretty well. He put me through a couple of eye tests to check my vision and that’s when a complication I encountered was revealed.

My Lasik Complication

Apparently when he was cutting the flaps of my eye for the laser, there was some serration that occurred. In layman’s terms, that means that instead of a straight cut through the eye tissue, the edges between the flap and the eyeball are a bit wavy. If you looked at it from the side, it might appear like a sine-wave or something close to it.

What that does is causes some slight deterioration in the vision that otherwise wouldn’t be there. He said it’s relatively common, but it generally goes away completely as the eye heals. The result of that serration is that my vision isn’t quite as good as it will be just yet and I should expect that my vision will be better on some days and worse on others until it does heal.

Oh goody.

I didn’t think to ask exactly why this happened. Maybe his hand slipped a bit, maybe the blade twisted, perhaps my eye twitched as he shoved the hatchet into it, or more likely I didn’t hold still as he screamed “Hold still you little bastard!” Ok, maybe I’m being a little over dramatic. Regardless, it happened but in the end this complication wasn’t really a big deal.

So the Spidey shields were removed for good. I was told I could go home and would need to come back in two weeks for another follow up. I wasn’t to watch television, read, get on the computer, or do much of anything that involved looking at stuff for another 24 hours. I would still need to wear the Spidey shields for another two weeks at night to keep myself from accidentally rubbing my eyes in the middle of the night.

A word of advice: When you go to the post-op, bring a pair of sunglasses. Your eyes will be a lot more sensitive to light and if you don’t bring sunglasses, it might be a little difficult to see. In fact, definitely bring sunglasses to the evaluation as well. The eye drops they give you during the pre-op really open up your pupils and it can be really blinding to the point of being dangerous to drive.

So I know what you’re thinking. How soon before you were able to go about your normal activities? I was back to normal almost immediately.

In fact, after having the surgery Saturday afternoon, on Sunday evening I got on a plane and flew out to see one of my customers the next morning. Monday and Tuesday, I avoided sitting at my computer as much as I could, but my eyes were basically fine. They tended to be a little dry, but the constant regime of eye drops helped keep that feeling at bay.

I did get a little scare on Sunday, which was the day right after my surgery. I was fooling around with my younger son and he twisted quickly as I tickled him, which resulted in his shoulder going into my right eye socket. He definitely hit my eyeball a little bit because my eye hurt, but it didn’t dislodge the flap that had been cut the previous day. I think my face caught most of the blow, but that ended me fooling around with the kids for the day.

A mere nine days after the surgery, the only symptoms left to speak of were continued blood spots (see photos) in my eyes around the iris and some continued dryness. I was still using the saline drops quite a bit, but it was getting to be longer and longer time periods between doses. By the 11th day I’d forgotten the saline drops more times than I could count.

This concludes Part 2 of this series. Tomorrow, I’ll post Part 3 and you can hear about the final results from almost 3 weeks after surgery and my conclusions about the ordeal.

On Saturday March 5th, I finally took the plunge and had LASIK surgery on my eyes. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for close to ten years now, but given my profession, I’ve always been very hesitant about it.

I feel stupid saying that to be honest because I’m sure everyone says something similar. After all, how do you do home repair if you can’t see the nails to hit them with a hammer? What about hair dressers, administrative assistants, or virtually any other profession. The idea that I think that my vision matters more than theirs is actually a bit absurd. But nonetheless, I’m entitled to feel that my vision is important.

Based on the success statistics, it seems fairly safe, but as we all know, numbers and statistics can be manipulated and placed into marketing material to say just about anything you want.

Since making it generally known that I was considering it, people I know have come out of the woodwork to share their experiences with the process. I knew about a dozen people who had it done prior to announcing my intent. Then I found perhaps another dozen people I knew had it done. A few people have asked me to share my experience and blog about it. So that’s what I have decided to do.

To begin with, I had planned on getting surgery in April or May of this year in preparation for my trip to the Bahamas in June. I simply wanted to be able to wear sunglasses instead of my regular glasses and some weird contraption to help shield my eyes from the Caribbean sun. When I went to Aruba for my honeymoon back in 2003, snorkeling was fun, but I couldn’t really see most of the fish very well.

I knew I had three months before my trip, but I wasn’t sure how long the waiting list would be or when they would have openings available. I happened to be home for a week after being grounded with pneumonia so I decided to make an appointment for an evaluation.

One place I called couldn’t get me in for an evaluation for another 2 weeks and told me up front that the cost would be $2,300 – $2,500 per eye. I had actually expected it to be a little lower because I had been evaluated back in 2005 and was told it would be $2,500 per eye back then. I was hoping the price would have dropped over time as the procedure became more widespread, but I live in the Boston area so things tend to be more expensive. For a bit of context, I knew my brother-in-law and his sister had theirs done in Canada nearly 10 years ago. It cost them about $1,500 for both of them and that included both eyes.

In any case, I knew I wanted to “shop around” a bit. The last thing you really want to be paying Wal-Mart prices for is eye surgery. Let’s face it. Joe’s Discount Lasik isn’t a risk you want to take. But I didn’t want to pay top dollar and not actually get any additional benefit other than the knowledge that I paid a lot more for it. As with just about anything, there exists a quality bar for eye surgery and once you’ve passed it, you’re overpaying. The extra money is not really granting you a lot of extra benefit. Whether I paid $3k or $5k, chances are pretty good that my vision would be about the same afterwards.

I was disappointed about the wait time for a simple evaluation and realized that although they did eye surgery, they also did a lot of cosmetic surgery, which made me wonder about their qualifications. Did they rent their equipment? If so, how often was it used? Was it moved a lot, did it need to be calibrated, etc.

I called another place which seemed to do a lot of surgeries. To my surprise, they could evaluate me in 2 days so I made an appointment. After the evaluation, they concluded that I was a good candidate for the procedure. I had somewhat expected this, given the results of my evaluation from 5 years ago. I had two different options available to me: standard LASIK and what they were calling Custom LASIK.

My understanding (which to be sure, is as fuzzy as my vision was) is that standard LASIK pricing was based on how bad my eyes were. Mine aren’t too bad, but it was still $899/eye. That didn’t include the cost of insurance in case my eyes deteriorated over time, which was going to add another $200/eye. I’m not a big fan of insurance in general, but this was expensive enough that for a lifetime guarantee, it seemed rather foolish to not do it.

The custom LASIK was a flat price of about $2,000/eye and that included the lifetime insurance. I was told that the custom LASIK uses some kind of 3D mapping of the eye to guide the laser, which makes it 25 times mired precise than traditional LASIK. Twenty-five times more precise? I didn’t look into all of the details of this particular procedure, but I’d heard of it before. Honestly, this decision was a no brainer to me, since I already budgeted in my head up to $5,000 for the procedure.

During the post-evaluation meeting, which was on a Thursday morning, they said they had an opening for the procedure on either that Saturday (a mere two days away) or in another two weeks on Friday. In addition, if I had the procedure done in March, it would be 25% off, dropping the price from $4,000 to $3,000. That was in the ballpark of what I considered to be reasonable. Not too much, and not too little. Like Goldilocks, it was just right.

I gave it some thought on the drive home, talked with my wife about it and decided to register for the procedure on Saturday. A simple deposit of $100 paid over the phone via credit card reserved my slot and I was ready to get sliced and diced.

Well, the next two days were awful. I didn’t sleep well at all. I don’t know whether I was nervous or stressed out from the work things I had on my plate, or what. But I didn’t get a decent night of sleep for two nights before the surgery.

We convinced my wife’s mother to watch the kids while my wife took me in for surgery on Saturday morning. Her mother completely freaked out when she heard I was getting surgery for my eyes, instantly worrying about how safe it was, had I done any research at all, etc. For those of you who are unmarried, having a mother-in-law is like having a second mother. That’s something nobody ever tells you, so make sure you take the time to meet your future second mother before you pop the question. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

And just for fun, I posted an obscure Facebook update indicating that I was headed in for surgery and to “wish me luck”. My mother calls around 10am Saturday morning to find out what’s going on. She’s not terribly thrilled that one of my hobbies is messing with people just to see what their response is, but I digress. I still think her rationale for having more children was that “the next one can’t possibly be any worse than this one”, not that she’d ever admit it.

Back to the story at hand, my appointment was at 11:45am, but I sat around for another 45 minutes. The surgeon requested that the ophthalmologist take another look at one of my eyes, take a few more measurements to double check some numbers and prep me for surgery.

It’s apparently standard procedure that they insert some plugs into your tear ducts prior to surgery in order to help prevent the various eye drops from being siphoned away too quickly. The ones they used on me were collagen and designed to dissolve after about 48 hours. The ophthalmologist explained what she was doing before she put them in and assured me that it wouldn’t hurt at all and I wouldn’t even feel them or know they were there.

Liar. Well, I suppose she half lied. It didn’t hurt, but even with the topical anesthetic, I could definitely feel the plugs. It was a very slight pressure that I would feel in my eyelids for the next 24 hours or so.

The surgeon looked at my eyes personally for a few minutes and said everything looked good, asking if I had any final questions.

Me: “Ummm… I was sort of expecting to get some sort of sedative to help me relax and they haven’t given it to me yet. Do you do that?”

Surgeon: “No, no, no. I don’t generally do that because it’s hard to predict how it’s going to affect a patient and if they’re too out of it, they can’t follow directions which can create complications. So I just don’t do that anymore unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

I considered pleading with him that it would be absolutely necessary, but given his demeanor and the fact that he’d done more than 40,000 eye surgeries over the past 10-15 years(a fact I learned later), I didn’t think it would help. I knew the procedure would only be about 15 minutes in total so I figured I could suck it up. Looking back on it, I wish I had pleaded my case a bit more but again, I don’t think it would have helped.

We got started a couple minutes after that and the best way for me to describe the process in a single word is that it was disconcerting. I had watched a video on YouTube several years ago to see how LASIK was done. I had also known enough about it to know what they generally did. Sometimes it’s better to not know the details, to be perfectly honest. If you’re squeamish at all or unsure of whether you want it done, don’t watch the video or read the next paragraph.

The video I watched showed them placing some sort of metal plate over the eyeball. It was curved sort of in the shape of the eye, but had a hole in the middle and had a flat piece near the top. This was intended to keep the blade level as the surgeon took the top layers of the eye off so the laser could do its’ work. I think they put the same sort of thing on my eye, but it’s hard to see exactly what they’re doing when it’s being done to you.

Everyone I’ve ever talked to about having the surgery done has always been terrified of blinking and not being able to keep their eyes open. For me, they used surgical tape to tape one eye open and they taped the other eye shut during the procedure. I found that a bit odd, but I assume it was to help keep my face from twitching too much. It seemed to help.

As I said earlier, the procedure itself was disconcerting and not knowing exactly what is going on is a really big part of it. I was awake without a sedative and after the YouTube video, I had a good idea of what was being done, but not exactly. At one point, they put this device over my eye and said I was going to feel some pressure.

Lies, lies lies.

I felt like my eyeball was being sucked out of my head! It hurt a bit inside my eye socket. Basically behind the eye itself but the front of my eye didn’t feel any pain. It was a really strange sensation and very difficult to describe.

And of course he says “Look straight at the light” while this is going on. What he didn’t tell me was that everything would go dark, making me completely blind. I panicked and said something to the effect of “I can’t see anything!” to which he replies in a matter of fact tone that it’s normal. Thanks for the heads up buddy. Fortunately, when it happened on the other eye, I was expecting it so my heart didn’t thump itself out of my chest and onto the floor the next time.

When we got to the part where they were ready to use the laser, I was instructed to look at the orange light. Now let me talk about that for a little bit because if you intend to get eye surgery, there’s something you need to know. Through the entire process, there’s this orange light that is intended to help give you something to focus on. This presumably helps keep your eye looking in the same direction at all times. Let me clue you in on a little secret. It doesn’t. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

The problem is that this light isn’t a pinpoint of light. It’s really close to your eye and thus, really fuzzy, out of focus, and it looks flipping huge. It seemed like the size of a golf ball at about arms length so it’s not exactly a “pinpoint”. Also, as you try to focus on it, it seems to move. I know my head wasn’t moving, so maybe my eye was twitching. Regardless, judging where the center of it is located so you can stare at it is pretty difficult. Staring at the edges definitely causes it to move.

All of this leads the surgeon to say “Don’t move” repeatedly and at an increasingly urgent tone as the nurses count down from a number that is based on how long the laser needs to fire into your eye. Others I spoke with in the post-op meeting said theirs was as high as 30. Mine was like ten trillion. Ok, it was 13 but it seemed like forever to hold really, really still or you’ll go blind.

And him saying “Don’t move” repeatedly freaks you out even more because you can smell the laser burning your eye tissue. I’m serious about that. You really can smell the laser burning your tissues. Deep in your brain, you know that if you move too much, it will probably screw up your eyesight.

Disconcerting? Oh yea. Where’s a sedative when you need it?

In the end, the whole process for both eyes only lasted about 15 minutes. Immediately afterwards, everything was fuzzy which I was told is normal. They taped these clear plastic, Spiderman eye shaped shields over my eyes and I sat in the waiting room with my eyes closed for the next two hours. It probably should only have been 30-45 minutes, but they were really busy and never got back to me. No joke there.

Part of the reason I chose this place was that this was basically their entire business. The other place I called seemed like they threw LASIK onto the menu just to get a few more customers. That’s like going to the farmers market to pick up some eggs, milk and a flat screen TV. It’s just not right. Instead, I felt more like we were cattle and that is sort of what I had been looking for. They knew what they were doing and ran a fairly lean ship because they did this all day long. Apparently, I ran into one of the drawbacks to this volume based model.

After two hours that should have only been 30 minutes, I got aggravated and sick of waiting. I asked my wife to flag someone down and ask WTF. They checked my eyes very shortly after that, scheduled me for a 7am post-op the next day and sent me home.

Arrival Time: 11:45am
Surgery Started: 1:15pm
Surgery Ended: 1:30pm
Discharge time: 4pm

Below are a couple of photos I took the day after surgery. Notice the really dark red splotches in my eyes around the outer edges. This wasn’t something I expected to happen, nor was it something they warned me would happen. But I wasn’t worried about it, since it’s hard to cut into any part of your body without it bleeding a little bit.

Tomorrow, I’ll post more about what happened right after the procedure and some complications I ran into.

Well, at 5:05pm on Friday (go figure on the time problems started), my computer was acting flaky so I decided to do the normal thing and reboot. Unfortunately, my desktop at the office decided to flake out entirely and for some reason decided it no longer wanted to be part of the Moon River domain. To top it off, the local passwords weren’t working either, so I couldn’t log in and do anything about it. I left it for the weekend and decided to deal with it on Monday when I got back.

So now it’s Monday and things have gotten worse. My PC has decided that it doesn’t like the filesystem on my boot drive and disk checks claim it is corrupted. My data drive is still perfectly intact, but the boot drive thinks there are now two partitions instead of just one and that neither of them is bootable. I think I’m going to have to resort to reinstalling the OS, which I always hate to do because of the fact that it’s just such a pain in the neck to reinstall all of my applications.

The only bright spot is that I’m pretty good about keeping non-essential data off my main PC and keeping backups of that data on an external drive and maintain regular backups of that external drive on my NAS server. I’m guessing that the odds of me having any essential data on that drive is pretty low, although I could be mistaken. I do tend to keep text files of notes I’ve taken about different phone calls on my desktop until I get a chance to enter them into our CRM system.

In other news, I’ve started on a new series of articles on how to build a consulting company. I expect to have the first article out the door sometime next week. It would be sooner, but I have a small computer problem to deal with.

No matter what anyone tells you, there’s more to changing blog engines than just clicking a few buttons and importing data. It tends to be a fair amount more complicated than that. In my last post, I highlighted some of the reasons, both rational and not so rational for my decision to change from SubText to WordPress.

It’s only been about a week or so, but I’ve learned a huge amount of “stuff”, for lack of a better term, and am thus far, I am rather pleased with the transition to WordPress. I thought that for the benefit of others, I would document my move to WordPress 2.7 from SubText 1.9.3 so that if others decide they’d like to try it, they can hopefully retrace my steps and experience a little bit less pain than I did.

When undertaking this sort of project, there’s really only one viable place to start looking for information on how to do this. Google. I found a number of links that I thought might be helpful and used them as a general starting point for deciding what to do, and how to do it.

Subtext to WordPress:
http://www.ageektrapped.com/blog/subtext-to-wordpress-converting-blog-engines/
http://www.copyandwaste.com/2008/09/15/hello-goodbye-subtext-to-wordpress/
http://blog.digitaltinder.net/2008/12/exporting-blogml-from-subtext-21-and-importing-blogml-into-wordpress-27/

Blogger to WordPress:

http://www.aaronlerch.com/blog/2007/08/23/breaking-up-moving-blog-engines/

DasBlog to WordPress:

http://www.kavinda.net/2008/10/23/migrating-from-dasblog-to-wordpress.html

WordPress to SubText:

http://betterthaneveryone.com/archive/2007/11/04/wordpress-to-subtext-done.aspx

Obviously the first set of links was much more helpful than the others, but for reference purposes, seeing how others dealt with converting to WordPress or reasons they moved away was somewhat enlightening. After running through the instructions on each of the first set of links, I came to one conclusion: that none of their sets of instructions were going to work for me directly due to the myriad of problems I was running into that they did not address. I felt there was more hand waving than hand holding. I like to hold hands, so here’s how I converted from SubText 1.9.3 to WordPress 2.7.1.

At a high level, the idea is to export from SubText to some intermediate format, and then import that into WordPress. In this case, the intermediate format which is probably the most straightforward to use is a BlogML XML file. The rationale is that you want to be able to keep all of your content and save time doing the conversion. The last blog engine transition I did was from CityDesk to SubText and it involved a lot of copy/pasting. Not fun.

BlogML is supposed to be a standard of some sort for moving your blog content from one platform to another. Unfortunately, the development is somewhat stagnant and not much of anything has gone on in quite some time. Their roadmap as of today indicates that version 3.0 is expected to be released in mid-2008. It’s early 2009 and version 2.5 is the only thing out there.

Another potential sticky point is that WordPress does not ship with a BlogML import module. Fortunately, a fellow blogger named Aaron Lerch built one and there are several variations floating around which fix a few different bugs. I’ll be offering up my own version in order to fix a couple more.

So, to reiterate, the idea is to export from SubText to BlogML, then import the XML into WordPress. Easier said than done.

Problem #1: Exporting to BlogML.
The BlogML exported in SubText doesn’t appear to work. At least it didn’t at first and in the version of SubText I was using. For the record, I was using version 1.9.3. Fortunately, I discovered almost by accident that the BlogML export feature for SubText doesn’t work if you instruct it to include embedded content, which is the default. I’m not sure specifically what that is meant to be, but from doing a bit of research, I gather that embedded content includes things like flash files, YouTube videos, or maybe even local images. In any case, including the embedded content caused it to fail. I unchecked the box to include embedded content, and viola. My BlogML XML file was ready to download.

Apologies to those of you using embedded content, but I really didn’t look too far into this. The cursory research on what embedded content was lead me to believe that I didn’t have any on my blog and could probably safely ignore it. Your mileage may vary.

Problem #2: Using Aaron Lerch’s BlogML Importer for WordPress.
This seemed flaky at first and it wasn’t clear at all why it just wasn’t working. I’d get the file upload textbox like the instructions stated, I’d attempt to upload my file, and then the fields would disappear and my browser would act as if nothing was wrong and it was done doing what it was supposed to do. I tried a few different browsers and got the same result with Firefox, IE 7, and Google Chrome.

It turns out that the BlogML import seems to use a fair amount of memory. My BlogML XML file was about 1.6MB. After digging through the apache error logs on my web server, I found that the web page was requesting about 32MB of memory to parse the XML file and the web server was denying that request, as it was limited to much less in terms of memory.

I really don’t have any idea why it requires so much memory to parse the BlogML file. Quick estimates ballpark the required memory to be about 20 times the size of your BlogML file. In my case, this was about 32MB of RAM. If my BlogML file were 5MB, I would likely need more than 100MB memory.

The quick fix to this issue was to add the following line of code to the blogml.php file:

ini_set("memory_limit", "64M");

You could always bump it up to 128M or higher, if needed. The alternative is to modify your php.ini file and alter the memory_limit for the entire apache instance, but I felt that this blog import was only going to be done once, so there was no need to allocate additional resources if it wasn’t really necessary. The machine has them to spare, but no point in wasting them.

You can download the XPath.class.php and blogml.php files that I used from here.

Problem #3: File upload problems
Once the BlogML importer seemed to be working, I immediately ran into a permissions issue. The BlogML Importer was unable to save my uploaded file to the web server due to a permissions error. I poked around a lot and the “fix” most often recommended was to change the permissions on the /wp-content/uploads directory to 777. Forgive me for working in the security field, or even being remotely security minded at all, but that’s the single most ridiculous suggestion I’ve ever heard.

If it was only made by one person, I could possibly dismiss this as just ignorance, but numerous people were suggesting that this approach was not only common, but was the recommended fix. Sorry folks. It’s not. I found that the most straightforward approach was to provide ownership of the uploads directory to apache. Immediately the problem went away, and nothing had to be made writeable by world.

Problem #4: Link redirection
This one could have been a total nightmare, but wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been. If you have a blog that you’ve been running for any length of time, the hope is that other people have linked to your blog. Even better, there’s a steady stream of traffic headed your way. Well, to keep that traffic from drying up quickly, you’re going to need to set up URL redirection using a .htaccess file on your new web server, thus redirecting pages from
/2008/12/25/its-christmas-time.aspx to something like /2008/12/25/its-christmas-time/.

That means that you need to know exactly what every single internal link on your site is, and exactly where it goes. Once you know where all your links are, then you add a RewriteRule to your .htaccess file for each of them. This RewriteRule will perform a redirection at the web server level, simultaneously providing the browser with a 302 error code to indicate that the page has permanently moved.

This should have been easier than it was, but I wasn’t using pretty URL’s in SubText, so I had to suffer through this part of it. It didn’t take long before I came up with what I felt was an adequate solution. I poked around a lot using Google and Yahoo, looking for web tools that would crawl my site and find all of my page links for me, but I didn’t find anything that was terribly helpful. Finally, I gave up and decided to roll my own.

Using my trusty Perl skills, I wrote a website crawler which I pointed at my original blog. After reading in the main page, it parsed the page for every link on the page. If the link was local to my domain, it would retrieve the contents of that page and recursively continue to do so until it had followed every single link on my website which pointed back to itself. I ignored image references and relative URL’s. I also ignored any link that was to an external website, as I have no control over those links anyway.

Given that there was a page in SubText containing a list of archived links, this solution worked really well. I was able to capture every single link on the page and for each URL, I was able to obtain the title of the page. This made building my .htaccess file pretty hassle free. It was still a little tedious, but for a few hundred links it only took a couple hours to search the content of my new blog for the title’s that I captured and match them up to the original URL’s.

Here is a link to the Perl code that I used for this. Feel free to hack away and use it for whatever you want. I’m releasing it under the GPL 3 license. Do with it what you will. To use it, simply install the Perl libraries (assuming you don’t have them) and set the primaryURL and the TLD variables. Run the subTextCrawler.pl file, and it will spit out a bunch of half-written RewriteRule’s for your .htaccess file.

The assumption is that you have your WordPress site up and running and have imported your BlogML file. I used a temporary domain pointer for this, so I was able to take the title printed on each RewriteRule line and search for the corresponding URL on my new WordPress site.

I could have gotten much fancier and searched my WordPress site using the title from the SubText site and completely automated it, but I’ll leave that for someone else to do. I’m just trying to get you most of the way there.

subTextCrawler.pl

Problem #5: Learning how to actually build a .htaccess file.
I was pretty stupid the first time I was working with my .htaccess file. It turns out that there are two things you need to keep in mind when using WordPress. First, is that WordPress expects to be able to modify this file. So, making .htaccess owned by apache solved the first issue. The second issue I had here was that the .htaccess file automatically is filled in with a set of rules that are dictated by your Permalink preferences. Whenever you browse to the Permalink preferences page within WordPress, this file is read, parsed, and then rewritten. All without clicking a save button.

It’s pretty irritating to put all of your RewriteRule lines in there, only to find they don’t work for some reason and not realize that it’s because the file is being overwritten whenever you browse to a specific admin page in WordPress. Your .htaccess file should look something like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
‹IfModule mod_rewrite.c›
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
‹/IfModule›
# END WordPress

The trick to adding your own RewriteRule options is to add another set of instructions above the ones created by WordPress. Once you do that, your changes will not be lost whenever you browse to the Permalinks page. I’m a fan of examples, so here’s some of what I ended up with:

‹IfModule mod_rewrite.c›
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^archive/2005/08\.aspx$ /2005/08/ [R=302,L,NC]
RewriteRule ^archive/2005/08/21/1\.aspx$ /2005/08/21/day-11-starting-a-new-business/ [R=302,L,NC]
RewriteRule ^archive/2005/08/22/2\.aspx$ /2005/08/22/day-12-the-website/ [R=302,L,NC]
...
one rule per line of subTextCrawler.pl output
...
‹/IfModule›

# BEGIN WordPress
‹IfModule mod_rewrite.c›
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
‹/IfModule›

# END WordPress

Conclusion:

Hopefully, someone out there finds this retelling of my experience useful and can save themselves a great deal of time and effort. Between the links above where people explained their processes, and my retelling of the problems that I ran into, you should at least have some answers as to how to tackle some of the problems you might run into.

Eventually, the Google Blog Converters project may help to allow your data to migrate between blog engines a little easier but it’s really just not there yet. Good luck!

Apologies for the lateness of this post. I wanted to post it last Tuesday which was when I made my new blog engine live. Unfortunately, I developed double ear infections that evening, which rapidly turned into a pair of ruptured ear drums, lots of pain, some hearing loss, 5 days of bed rest, and prescriptions involving Percocet and antibiotics. I can’t hear much at the moment, but happy about it and don’t feel any pain. I don’t really know how that works but it does. I slept for a few hours this afternoon so now it’s the middle of the night and I can’t sleep. I feel like I’m on the mend for the time being. Monday I go under the knife for unrelated surgery which will put me back on bed rest for several days. Back to my originally scheduled blog post…

It’s pretty amazing that it’s so incredibly easy to start a blog these days. Unfortunately, writing and maintaining a blog is like getting married. Once you choose blogging platform, you’re essentially stuck and changing blogging platforms is about as painless as getting divorced. In the best case, it’s not any fun. In the worst, you lose pretty much everything you ever had.

For more than a year now, I’ve been considering changing blog engines. Interestingly enough, that time frame also coincides quite nicely with my dramatic drop-off in blog posts. Why put more work into a blog if you’re just digging your hole deeper? I knew that every blog post I was going to add was just going to increase the amount of work I’d need to do to perform the conversion and decrease the motivation to actually move to another platform.

However, last week I decided to finally bite the bullet and just get it over with. After all I’d been absent from my blogging duties for nearly a year. With my Masters degree now out of the way, I really didn’t have a good excuse to put it off any longer. So I started at the most obvious place imaginable for how to convert my blog from SubText to something else. Google.

I suppose I should back up a little bit and explain my reasons for abandoning SubText. After all, I do a fair amount of .NET development and SubText is written in .NET with a SQL Server back end. Let me put it bluntly. I had higher expectations for SubText as a platform.

Issue #1: Annoying bugs
One example I can point immediately to because it was the most irritating when I finally found the cause was the existence of a paging error in the categories. If you had 9 catagories, it worked fine. If you had 10, it wouldn’t show any categories. If you had 11, you were ok again. So for a while I had 11 categories, one of which I never ever used.

But you’re a .NET developer! It’s an open source platform! You could have fixed it yourself.

I’m sorry, but I have this thing about software. It just needs to work. Time and time again, I hear developers scream about how great open source software is because if there’s a bug, you can go into the code and fix it yourself. That’s nice. Honestly, I think that’s really great. But when push comes to shove, I really don’t have the time to waste making features work that should have worked to begin with. The release I was using was

Issue #2: Excessive Complexity
I opened up the source code for version 1.9.3, which is the version of SubText I was on and there were 10 projects. TEN! Maybe I feel like I was just spoiled by the classic ASP programming model where you had one asp page file, maybe a couple of include files for commonly used functions, and that was about as complicated as it got for any given web page. I’m as much a fan of the .NET framework as the next Windows programmer, but ten projects for a blogging engine just seems really excessive. Just finding the right project is sometimes a chore, and the documentation for SubText leaves a little to be desired. You also need to download additional components to get SubText to compile.

I’ve always hated it when you want to compile something and you’re missing a dependency, which has another dependency, which also has another dependency. Eventually, you’ve installed just about everything and are 9 dependencies deep, only to find out that there are bugs which won’t let it compile anyway and then you have to fix those too because someone didn’t account for something like 64 bit processors which were years and years away. Occasionally, you’ll also find that due to some obscure bug in version 9.4.2 of dependency 34 in the sixth level of hell, it won’t compile, but only on your machine, as evidenced by the following directives found buried in some include file.

#ifdef YOURMACHINE
#error "This won't compile on your machine because we think you're a loon!"
#else
#error "Not your computer this time, but we still think you're a loon!"
#endif

In this case, I actually already had the required additional components from Microsoft on one of my machines, but not all of them. This wasn’t terribly painful, just another minor annoyance.

In the end, I found the guts of it just too incomprehensible to work with easily. I’m sure that given enough time, I could have done so, but time is not something that I have a lot of, so I simply didn’t bother.

Issue #3: Roadmap, or lack there-of
Another point in the defense of SubText is the fact that I was running version 1.9.3 and the most recent version is 2.1. Perhaps the most recent version would have made a difference, but I’m guessing not. There have only been 4 new releases since I installed the version I have, and that was 4 years ago. The roadmap for the product could use some work, as could the communication of when releases are actually going to happen.

Knowing what is going to be available in version 2.0 is nice. Knowing when I should expect to actually see version 2.0 would be nicer. Yes, I know it’s an open source product, but I really don’t care. I see no reason why open source projects shouldn’t be held to the same standards as commercial software. If they want to be treated as if they’re just as good, they need to be just as good, and that includes release schedules.

Issue #4: Plug-ins for extensibility
Something else I wanted was to be able to extend the blog with plug ins, and there just weren’t any for SubText. Were they coming, and if so, when? I had no idea. Supposedly in version 2.0, whenever that was going to be. (See Issue #3)

Issue #5: Comment spam
Honestly, this should have been a no-brainer. Didn’t anyone working on SubText see the amount of spam coming into their own blogs? It’s pretty ridiculous the amoung of comment spam that I get on my own blog, and the expressions that you’re supposedly able to add to help filter them simply don’t work. (yes, another annoying bug, see Issue #1)

Issue #6: Haphazard looking website
If you browse the website for SubText, one thing you’re going to notice is that depending on which links you click, you seem to get conflicting information. For example, the main page states that version 2.1 is out. If you click on Docs, then About, and then “Requirements”, they state the requirements for Subtext 1.5 and 1.9(when it is released).

Eventually, I realized that none of these things were getting any better. I could get involved and try to help out, but I really just don’t have the time. Maybe when I’m independently wealthy, I’ll revisit this course of action, but for now it’s easiest to just abandon SubText and move to a blog engine that better suits my needs.

It took me all of 10 minutes to decide to switch to WordPress. I’ve used it in the past for other blog projects, and it worked really well. I did a quick install on one of my linux servers, kicked the tires a bit, and decided that it was certainly going to be worth whatever trouble I had to endure. In fact, I installed a plug-in called WP-Syntax in less than 5 minutes and achieved syntax highlighting and line numbering on the C pre-processor code you see above. And so it is, that you’re reading this today on a new WordPress blog engine.

My next post (possibly not until after my surgery) will be all the fun things I encountered while trying to get away from SubText and into WordPress.